E. M. Forster

“So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”

“Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.”

“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

“Nonsense and beauty have close connections.”

“The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.”

“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”

“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”

“I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of...”

“People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.”

“One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.”

“The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely t...”

“At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.”

“The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.”

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

“There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.”

“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”

“Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.”

“The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience,...”